Lin buttons the top button of the tuxedo shirt and looks me up and down.
“Put the tie and jacket on,” she commands.
I grab the white bowtie and comply, using my bots since my fingers don’t know how to tie one of these. I slip on the white jacket and she regards me critically for a moment.
“That will do,” she finally says with a sad smile. It’s the first smile I’ve seen on her face since before Yang Song died. I guess it’s only been a day. Not even that. But it feels much longer. “Thank you again for coming out on such short notice, Eduardo.”
The diminutive tailor nods, double checking the pins at my waistline. According to Alan, his operation is the best tailoring shop in Vegas, and the only one big enough to get us all fitted today. It cost a hefty chunk of change to get him to drop all his other appointments to come down on a couple of hours notice. Not that I mind. Money doesn’t mean so much to me now with that river of gold coming out of the mountain and augmenting our funds. It’ll be weird to just stop worrying about the family’s finances altogether, but that’s where we’re headed once the other new automines come online.
“Good,” he says through his thick mustache. “Take him off. I have ready tomorrow. Who is next?”
To Evan: You’re up, come on in.
Evan steps through the doorway with Valerie close behind him.
“Un desafío. Bueno!” Eduardo declares, cracking a smile as he eyes Evan’s massive shoulders. “Last one too easy, this one more fun.”
“Black for him and all the rest of the boys,” Lin declares.
“White shirt, black jacket?” Eduardo asks. “Is very traditional. Good choice.”
“Yes, do that,” Lin says. “For him and the other brothers. Black shirts are fine too if they want them.”
“Black on black for me then,” Evan says.
“Muy bien. We get that done,” Eduardo says confidently, wrapping his measuring tape around Evan’s waist. He’s reaching for clothes from his massive rolling rack as we head out into the foyer of the residence. Siblings of all sizes are lined up at the doors to our makeshift fitting rooms, waiting for Eduardo and his assistants to measure them. I don’t know why Lin decided that we all needed new formalwear for the funeral, but at this point I’m ready and willing to give her anything she wants.
“Come on,” Lin says, leading me by the hand. “Let’s get her ready.”
We head down to the garage. I release the bots that had been converting the trunk into a makeshift refrigerator. The outside of the car is dotted with condensation and cool to the touch as I open the trunk.
“I don’t want to see her again,” Lin says, turning away.
“You want me to just handle this?” I ask her gently. “You don’t have to be here.”
“No, I want to be here. I just don’t want to look.”
It doesn’t make any sense to me, but I just go with it. I lift the corpse from the trunk and enfold her in an opaque wrapping of bots. Thinking better of it, I transform the wrapping into a sleek black box. A coffin, I guess. I scrub out the trunk and double check the rest of the car, making sure not to leave anything that might point to the vehicle as a crime scene. Not that I expect any kind of investigation, but you can’t be too careful. We’ll need to replace the headrest, but I’m not in the mood to do the detailed work of recreating textiles right now.
“Alright, you can look now,” I tell Lin.
She turns and sees the floating coffin.
“Let’s take her up. I want to do this out on the field.”
I float the coffin ahead of us as we make our way up the stairs and over to the grassy commons at the center of the campus. I’ve been letting most of my cloud soak up heat and sun in preparation for this since I woke up, so I should have plenty of energy to get it done quickly and cleanly.
“Do you want to say anything first?” I ask Lin.
“Not now,” she says. “We can have words later when we do the funeral. Just do it.”
Lin told me earlier today that if this were a traditional service we’re technically supposed to do the cremation after the funeral, but she would rather have me do it now. I’m not going to say no. I don’t know anything about funeral traditions from her birth culture, so it’s the same to me either way. I nod and start discharging batteries, heating the box up to over a thousand degrees. The bots still streaming in towards the coffin get hot before they arrive, creating streaks of light as their tiny hulls heat up to incandescence. I’ve never done anything quite like this, at least not on this scale, and the feedback sensations are new and different. The second body that is my cloud feels tingly and burning. Not in a painful way though, it’s less like I feel the heat and more like I am the heat. I lay down protective layers of bots in an insulating formation below the coffin in time to stop the grass below from beginning to smolder.
My overlay feeds me the reaction progress inside the box, the melting of fat, the breakdown of proteins, the evaporation of the water in her body. The buildup of gasses threatens to overwhelm even the incredible structural integrity of the coffin material formed by the bots. Just like I researched this morning, I form a secondary box on one end of the now-glowing coffin with a filtration system. On the other end I create an air intake, pumping oxygen in. The filter end begins to emit steam and carbon dioxide as the many compounds that make up the human body are broken down to their most simple states. I feel the steel point and copper casing of the bullet, near melting but not quite there. I grind them to a fine powder and eject them from the box, letting them fall to the ground. They have no right to belong with her ashes.
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Some of the nannies and other staff stop to watch the cremation. Mrs. Hastings emerges from the residence and looks on sadly. My grandparents come up on either side of Lin and put their arms around her. Lin starts to wail. Not cry. I don’t think there are even any tears. She wails. A high, keening expression of pure grief unlike anything I’ve ever heard and hopefully something I never hear again. I want to join her, but I can’t feel those kinds of feelings anymore and I know it’s not my place. Instead, I express the hollow where grief should be in the intensity of the heat and the perfect decomposition of the tissue and bone.
A whole bunch of siblings peek out from the residence doors. I feel Andrea fighting through them and emerging, striding purposefully towards us with a large object held in both hands. I turn around to look, and she’s holding a green dragon that looks like it’s carved from a massive dark emerald.
Words in the same shade of green spin out into the air in front of Andrea.
Yang Song told me once that we were wrong to use the dragon as a symbol for your cancer. The dragon is fierce and dangerous, but it is also wise and kind. Yang Song is the true dragon.
Lin nods and cries as the words fade. Andrea puts the dragon on the ground as close to the incinerator as she can get without getting burned. The top part of the dragon opens up like magic, revealing the hollow interior. I check my index, and that’s the most words Andrea has ever put together in any form since I’ve known her. Writing that message must have taken her tremendous time and effort, probably more so than the statue. She must really care.
The incineration is complete. I feed the batteries of my cloud off the abundant ambient heat, quickly cooling the dust that remains through nano-catalyzed endothermic reactions down to a manageable temperature. I funnel the remains carefully into the hollow in Andrea’s creation. It fits almost perfectly, and Andrea seals the top seamlessly.
“Thank you, Noah,” Lin says, composing herself again. “And thank you Andrea. It’s beautiful.”
Andrea smiles sadly and nods. Lin picks up the dragon urn and stalks towards the residence steps. I walk next to Andrea as we follow behind her. I turn to talk to Andrea quietly as we go.
“This was Jeff. He’s responsible for at least eight deaths so far,” I say, including the hired team of Otis and Keith as part of his kill count. That only seems fair to me. “Plus who knows how many others. Most of them were innocent, just bystanders in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
According to my index, this is usually the part where she ignores me and walks away. This time is different though. She takes a moment to acknowledge my words, but finally nods.
“And now he’s got a working cloud and he’s shown that he’s willing to let bots run wild. He could literally destroy the world. I need you off the sidelines, Andrea. You’re so smart, you’re so strong, and you understand Jeff as well as anyone in the world. We need you. You can help make this stop. Please. Please, help us.”
We’re inside the residence doors by the time she finally nods again. A tear runs down one of her cheeks as Lin reaches the center of the foyer. Siblings all around the edges of the room, still waiting for their fittings, look on curiously. She sets down the dragon.
“Noah, Andrea, a little help here please? I’d like a monument. Something strong. Something beautiful. Like Yang Song.”
Andrea and I look at each other and she starts swirling designs in the air in front of Lin for potential pedestals. I reach out to the west, stretching swiftly from the campus across the desert wastes to the foothills of the mountains where the Geologists told me the right kind of stone for something like this can be found. I start carving a chunk of granite big enough for any of the designs Andrea is showing. Another part of my brain assesses the structural integrity of the floor to see if it can hold the mass of the block I’m freeing from the side of the mountain. Of course it can’t.
I start reinforcing the structural elements in the basement below. One of the storage rooms sprouts a new support pillar. I hope that doesn’t get in anyone’s way. The wooden joists and planks of the flooring under the tile get banded in alloys that will let them hold the tons of rock. The granite block is loose now and looks good. No significant structural flaws. I form a sequence of rollers and start moving it back towards campus. On its way I roll it past the replica campus that I built for practice a whole lifetime ago, back when I was mastering my cloud and Father was still alive. I should come up with a use for that place at some point.
The rollers thunder along, dissolving as soon as the massive stone is past, forming in front of it just in time as the stone approaches. The thing is massive and the momentum on it is tremendous now that it’s moving. Andrea and Lin have decided on a design for a fitting memorial. It’s large but tasteful, about a meter and a half tall and one meter around. I guessed well on my block. We won’t be able to use the foyer for large meetings anymore, but we were probably due for a new, larger space for that anyway.
Andrea steadies the design in the air and starts working out details with Lin. I start doing the rough cuts on the stone as it moves. I’ve got the basic shape right by the time I hear the rumbling of the rollers with my human ears. The younger kids look amazed as the massive stone rolls through the gates, across the grass, and up to the foot of the residence steps. The older sibs that have clouds of various versions look studiously nonchalant about it, but I can tell by their vitals that they’re all impressed that I could conjure it up this quickly.
I wave to my classmates along with the Roadbuilders and Doctors to give me a hand hoisting it up the steps and placing it gently in the center of the foyer. I could have just done it on my own, but I think this will give them a little bit of a sense of ownership for it. I’d have brought in the Geologists too, but they’re still all out at the new automine site and won’t be home until after dinner tonight.
Andrea goes to town on the detail work for the monument, smoothing the surface and carving dragons and what look like Chinese characters into it. Since when did Andrea write Chinese? I don’t have any record of that, but I guess I’ve been out of touch with her lately other than my requests for help with Jeff.
Lin looks on, nodding as Andrea works. I clear the dust as it comes off the hard stone, depositing it outside the campus walls. The rock looks gray from a couple of meters away but as I approach I see it’s speckled with black and white and every shade between. It looks really good where Andrea has polished it. Before long, it feels like the whole campus is watching as Andrea sculpts. Lin cradles the dragon in her arms, waiting for the monument to be done.
At last the top is finished, smoothed, and polished. Lin lifts the dragon on and Andrea slides it over, perfectly centering it and fusing the base to the pedestal. I didn’t realize it, but I’ve really missed working with Andrea. The three of us look at each other, then look at the dragon memorial. Lin smiles a broken smile.
Andrea puts her arms around Lin and holds her for a long time.